I have mixed feelings about the documentary. On the one hand, it was a
_heroic doctor_ show, about fear of disease, and not about disability at
all. On the other (and I didn't even fully recognize this on first viewing)
it exhibited a lot of the bigotry against the "afflicted" without the
producers even seeming to notice that bigotry was being depicted. (So it
_was_ about disability; it just depicted an unselfconsciously bigoted
version.)
[from Simi]
>"...Bad enough to be crippled, worse to be a constant
>reminder."
>If that kind of narrative had been analyzed to uncover the impact on
>disabled people, and the prejudice on which those views are based, I
>would have no objection - but it was dropped in with no comment.
Right. The quotation that jarred me was a mother talking about her son
after he came home from the hospital, and his horrible "Frankenstein walk"
in his braces. When I first heard this kind of statement I thought "Ok, now
they're going to talk about disability prejudice" but no, they just
exhibited the prejudice and walked on past.
> The dcotors and nurses were portrayed uniformly as good and
>benevolent people. We know this wasn't always the case.
Yep. They hinted at how horribly the kids were treated in hospitals, but
nothing like the truth. The truth (that children with polio were often
treated in a way that would be universally characterized as abuse if it
happened today) would spoil the heroic doctor story. I didn't go to a
hospital when I had polio ... they were too full (lucky me) ... but I've
seen some of the stories on Polio Listservs. The producers had to have made
a conscious decision not to describe the lives of hospitalized children in
too much detail. They just described what they looked like to "normals".
They had "Frankenstein walks". Even the technique Simi mentioned of
interviewing most survivors as talking heads, with no indication of their
permanent disability, allowed the viewer to keep the image of pathetic
crippled children (not disabled adults) as the theme of the show.
It might be an interesting classroom exercise to show this film late in a
course on disability studies and see how students reacted. The film elicits
the same kind of pitying attitude that certain students develop in DS
courses (mine anyhow). So reaction to the film might be a good test of
which students were really catching on and which ones were just learning to
mouth the slogans.
Ron
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Ron Amundson
University of Hawaii at Hilo
Hilo, HI 96720-4091
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